...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins

zaterdag 6 juli 2013

The pale Sundays in Average City Stad/City Jan van der Til Artists' Book Photography

Today we spent the entire day at the other end of the print­ing spec­trum at Het Grafisch Huis in Gronin­gen (sorry no web­site), with one floor below us a one mil­lion dol­lar baby print­ing a pub­li­ca­tion we’re work­ing on — but more about that tomor­row. While wait­ing for the plates and the proofs, color mas­ter Bart showed us an artist book they had printed for Jan van der Til, a rigidly con­cep­tual pho­tog­ra­pher liv­ing in the area. As in Fis­chli & Weiss’s Sicht­bare Welt (Vis­i­ble World) this book con­tains not a sin­gle word. Not even the maker’s name, year of pub­li­ca­tion or what­ever indi­ca­tion of ori­gin is given. How­ever, when you buy the book, it comes in a plas­tic wrap­per with a plas­tic sheet inserted. On the front cover side a sin­gle word is given: Stad (city), and on the back side a sheet with the most essen­tial infor­ma­tion is inserted under the wrap­per. Los­ing that sheet means los­ing track of every­thing that anchors the book to a spe­cific date and place in time.

book by Jan van der Til, with wrap­per and inserted print on the back

Inside is where things start hap­pen­ing — or not, depend­ing on your per­sonal reac­tion to the images you will find there: a hyp­notic sequence of non­de­script urban land­scapes in what is in fact the city of Gronin­gen, but what could be any town in Hol­land. All sig­ni­fiers and mark­ers tying a place to a spe­cific loca­tion have been kept out of the com­po­si­tion, there is only the built envi­ron­ment in a very naked form. The words for what Van Til is after come easy to me in Ger­man: kennze­ich­nende Bedeu­tungslosigkeit. These are images of the insignif­i­cant land­scape as we have con­structed it for our­selves. Yet by that very feat these land­scapes have become iconic for our times. Pre­sented with­out words or other clues, the viewer is obvi­ously expected to estab­lish his/her own rela­tion with the work and with the land­scapes impli­cated. A Rorschach test for mod­ern man, try­ing to fathom his pri­mary reac­tion to the world he lives in. Write down the first five things that enter your head when you see these pho­tographs and we will tell you who you are.

sam­ple page, photographed

sam­ple page, photographed

What struck and attracted us imme­di­ately was a very pro­nounced neu­tral­ity and flat­ness of the images, the plane of sur­face com­pletely smooth, as if the maker wanted to give the viewer noth­ing to hold on to. To a Dutch per­son, envi­ron­ments like these will look com­pletely nat­ural — this is what our coun­try looks like, it has these light fix­tures, these roof tiles, these garbage con­tain­ers, these pave­ment pat­terns, these types of houses, these kinds of bushes and trees. For me, look­ing at these places has the sen­sa­tion of being planted in an unknown yet famil­iar loca­tion — and all around me there is deaf­ness, as if I am wear­ing a space suit and a hel­met. I can only stare at what is in front of me. I am alone in a strange kind of empti­ness, devoid even of a feel­ing of dan­ger or impend­ing action. I have become like the pho­to­graph, a still, a point in time, sense­less but for the eyes. It is an absolutely mes­mer­iz­ing sensation.

from the archives of Jan van der Til

On his web­site, Jan van der Til has archived a size­able col­lec­tion of such non-locations, with the only draw­back that the viewer/web user can­not expe­ri­ence the series in its entir­ity sim­ply by click­ing through it. You have to open every sin­gle image in a sep­a­rate win­dow, which I haven’t done yet, but which I am tempted to do. The mes­mer­iz­ing sen­sa­tion is almost as addic­tive as the pub­li­ca­tion, with the not unim­por­tant dif­fer­ence that the col­ors are dif­fer­ent, tak­ing you away some­what from what hap­pens when look­ing in the book. In the end, tac­til­ity in pho­tog­ra­phy might be more impor­tant than we web view­ers some­times would like to believe.